Violence, trauma and subjectivity: compromise formations of survival in the novels of Rawi Hage and Mischa Hiller

Abstract

The main protagonists of three recently published novels, Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game (2006) and Cockroach (2008) and Mischa Hiller’s Sabra Zoo (2010) are young men negotiating their coming of age under conditions of extreme social disintegration, finding their faltering way to adulthood after repeatedly witnessing and/or perpetrating acts of violence during the Lebanese War. With reference to a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma, this essay shows via a close engagement with these three novels, the extent to which psychic, as opposed to physical survival is dependent on a creative re-fashioning of social bonds. Hage and Hiller offer the reader strikingly different literary resolutions to the problem of continuing to live with the unbearable, and the juxtaposition of their work serves to illustrate the extent to which resilience depends on a widened sense of being with others. This does not, however, preclude the need for a pragmatic effort of attentiveness to each unique case of suffering encountered